Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

She had hung up without a word and had continued on up the mountainside, with her daughter’s voice in her ear, even if it had broken now and then like that of a teenage boy whose voice was changing — with nothing but the voice, not a moment’s thought for the news it had imparted. It was still the voice of a child, which, although it articulated every word carefully, spoke as if only in vowels. The vowels shaped every one of the words, and the sentences, too.

In this sense, that voice had had nothing Arabic about it, a language in which even children’s speech consisted almost entirely of hissing, fricative, throaty, coughing, and choking sounds? Or maybe not? The vowels carried the words, transported them, breathed soul into them, lent them wings. They had come from afar and at the same time from an abundant source and had set more than just her hearing to vibrating. These gently wafting vowels, forming an acoustic garland, created in the listener a sound chamber that made him able to reply in the same trusting, candid tone, and so on, back and forth, forth and back.

In the mountain telephone booth she had not answered, yet the voice continued to resonate in her long afterward, so she now made up for that. As she climbed, she spun around, and now gave her replies: “Here it is warm, too. Or does it only seem that way to me? Ah, a lizard, look. Show yourself. Do not hide. You do not know how to hide, my child. You never knew how to hide. When you played hide-and-seek with the others, you were always the one who could be seen right away, even more clearly than before the game began. You can play anything else and turn anything into a game, but not hiding. Ah, look, the first eagle. And oh my, here the wild boars have rooted up the grass. Ahoy!”

In the immortal old books that had preceded her own story, this stretch would probably have been one of those that were described thus: “He [the hero, for it could only have been a ‘he’?] walked, rode, sailed [so and so many] miles and hours without encountering anything worth telling [or even ‘worthy of telling’].”

But of course her story was supposed to take place in a time when it was less the purely external surprising, astonishing, and unusual happenings that provided material — a time when mere actions as a source for the plot seemed to have been exhausted long since — than the astonishing and unusual juxtapositions of external and internal, the interactions and indeed the resonances, thus also appropriate to the time or era of her story, or even “lighting the way” (like the rose in the old poem)? Or lighting her way home, or around the corner?

And accordingly she then emphasized in a conversation with her designated author that the aforementioned stretch was an episode worthy of telling, even if nothing happened other than her climbing up the mountain, the wafting of the air, and the blueing of the sky.

And again her wrath, almost an outburst of rage, and this from her, the financial manager, the expert on money and numbers, when the author had the audacity to ask how and with what she, traveling without cash, had paid for the hotel and her provisions that morning in Pedrada, etc.: No: that was of no relevance or reality when it came to their book, at least in this part. “That is not it. That is not how it is.” The question was “completely idiotic” and gave reason to fear that he, the author, had not yet understood what she had in mind for the book. “Or are you merely trying to provoke me?” There were already hundreds of articles about her, crammed with banking and money matters. “Don’t tell me, and us, every little thing.”

She actually did ride part of the way, bareback on a Sierra horse, long-legged, gleaming brownish-black, which was waiting, as if just for her, under an overhanging cliff, as was the rounded rock on the ground from which she swung herself onto the horse’s back; both ready for her as if for the repetition of a scene in her old film.

She could have ridden up to the ridges (the precipitous southern slopes were too much for even a native horse); the animal carried her as if she were nothing, or as if she were no one. But very soon she dismounted from its rather narrow back and continued her journey on foot. And again, when she turned and looked back from higher up, the horse was standing under an overhanging rock, but now with others, of the same color, in a row, as if at an abandoned hack stand; on each horse sat an even darker Sierra jackdaw, picking something out of the horse’s coat and mane and teeth and nostrils.

And still, as had been the case ever since her departure from the settlement, pairs of cattle horns stared at her here and there from amid the broom or escoba bushes (otherwise there was hardly any taller vegetation, only scattered scrub pines, most of them long since dead and stripped of their bark); the horns were very wide and curved, almost always ending in a pointed, straight section, and occasionally one of the powerful, always anthracite-black bodies would loom up from amid the tangle of broom branches in the omnipresent chest-high thicket, the cow’s or bull’s eyes seemingly aimed and guided on both sides by the horns’ dagger tips; this time more Ávila cattle than usual were spending the winter high in the Sierra.

She walked without stopping, without changing pace; without in any way deviating from her pace. She did not stop even when she passed the corpses of the stonemason and the woman from Friuli or Lefkadia, lying side by side at a spot in the tundra, with gunshot wounds in their scalps, in their crowns, their eyes still open, hardly broken, in which she saw herself recognized, unlike in the ultramarinos shop earlier, and again this dead couple stood in for her parents, killed in an accident.

During earlier crossings of the Sierra de Gredos, whenever she came upon an animal, especially in open patches, she had headed straight for it, not in a hurry but speeding up a little, until she stood body to body with it, for a moment, “el trance,” as if grown together with it — in the same way in which she rendered potential human attackers defenseless by leaving them no surface to attack — and then briskly continued in her chosen direction, even if it might be the wrong direction at first.

With her walking, with her manner of walking, she protected herself, made herself invulnerable to attack. True, it was a kind of loafing. But because it had a rhythm, it had value. And furthermore, so she imagined, or was almost certain, she also protected others by walking, and by walking as she was walking now. With her walk and her walking now she was protecting her distant, absent brother. And in particular she was protecting him in this fashion from himself.

By walking this way through the Sierra, his sister was doing her part to make sure that he, who had previously committed violent acts only against objects, was restrained from his first outbreak of violence against a human being. Once he crossed this threshold, which had been calling to him or even drawing him magnetically for a long time—“ever since I became aware [his words] of my mother- and fatherlessness”—there would be no turning back. Her brother would then take aim at more and more people, at the whole human race, at life. As he had long fantasized to himself and also to her, he would run amok in a way precisely calculated and planned, and intended for the duration, with that treacherous glow in the corners of his eyes and mouth that women in particular saw as a kind of magical smile. And precisely on this day, at this hour, after another of his nocturnal wanderings, this time in an uninterrupted circle around an encampment of occupation troops in his chosen country, his ultimate (she to the author: “Occasionally it is all right to use a term of non-Germanic origin”) crossing of the line was imminent — his first murderous blow.